Speaking with Al Jazeera, the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue lamented mutual ignorance between Christians and Muslims.
“We succeeded in avoiding the clash of civilizations; let us avoid a clash of ignorance,” said Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran. In Europe, he stated, “there is a fear of Islam, but it is due to ignorance.”
“If you speak to right-wing groups, you realize that they have never opened a Qur’an and never met a Muslim.,” he continued. “There needs to be a big effort to educate, to inform them … because most of the problems are coming from misinterpretation or ignorance.”
Cardinal Tauran also criticized the attitudes of some Muslims towards Christians.
In some textbooks, “Christians are never called Christians, they are called misbelievers, and this is not right,” he said. “You cannot deny that they are the target of a kind of opposition. I have been in the Middle East for many years and what I felt was that Christians feel they are second-class citizens in countries where Muslims are the majority.”
“If Christians would leave the Middle East, it would be a tragedy, because first of all they are leaving the earth where they were born because Christians have always been in the Middle East,” he added. “And all the holy places would become museums, and that would be a catastrophe.”